Saturday, November 17, 2012

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the U.S. “absolutely” should get rid of the debt ceiling as soon as possible... “It would have been time a long time ago to eliminate it,” Geithner told Bloomberg TV on Friday. “The sooner the better.”

...Hey, you know what else isn’t a tenable strategy for the country? Spending a trillion dollars we don’t have on a counterproductively bloated bureaucracy, every year.

I understand what Geithner is getting at, of course — the playing chicken and flirting-with-breaching the ceiling, which we’re slated to hit again this February/March, isn’t good for our financial resume. Just abolishing the debt ceiling, however, isn’t the conversation we need to be having — and it’s jaw-dropping that our credit rating is even in this kind of jeopardy. The conversation we need to be having is how to drastically reduce the amount of debt we’re annually incurring, and it’s a conversation that Democrats are persistently ignoring in favor of piddling, economy-damaging tax hikes...

Precisely what America needs: a Treasury Secretary -- who cheated on his taxes -- advising America how to incur even more debt. Classic.